In the nation’s latest workplace shooting, former TV news reporter Vester Lee Flanagan II claimed in a manifesto that he was motivated by racial discrimination.

His tipping point, he wrote, came June 17, when a racist white man entered a historic church in Charleston, S.C., and fatally shot nine African American prayer group members. But when Flanagan, who was black, shot and killed white television reporters Alison Parker, 24, and Adam Ward, 27, during a live broadcast Wednesday, he put himself in the same league as the man accused in the church killings, Dylann Roof.

I hope that realization was one of the last things that passed through Flanagan’s confused mind — other than the bullet he fired to end his life.

Flanagan’s actions were the result of more than a decade of growing frustration and failure. He’d bounced from news station to station, twice filing lawsuits claiming that racial discrimination was the cause for his dismissal. But both cases were dismissed due to lack of merit.

His last act, filming and distributing a video feed of the double-slaying across social media outlets, was yet another failed attempt at broadcast journalism.

The troubled narrative he offered up in a 23-page rant didn’t jibe with reality.

Flanagan killed two successful television journalists who worked for a television station, WDBJ in Roanoke, Va., that had fired him in 2013 due to his job performance and erratic behavior.

Parker and Ward embodied Flanagan’s elusive career goals. It must have eaten away at the former Oakland resident to watch them so effortlessly do a job that he could not. He never worked with Parker and had only a passing acquaintance with Ward. They were little more than symbols in the mind of an increasingly irrational person who was coming unhinged from reality.

But instead of facing his own demons, Flanagan turned to an old standby, a version of events that has sparked nationwide debate. He cried wolf, blamed his actions on racism, and believed it would provide an acceptable explanation for the violence he carried out against two people he hardly knew.

Flanagan was half-right. Racism did play a role in the deaths of Parker and Ward, but his analysis was way, way off. Parker and Ward were not the racists in this case. Neither were his former employers.

This time around, Flanagan needed to look no further than the mirror to find the culprit.

It was Flanagan’s world view that led him to the actions he carried out, and he basically laid it out in the lengthy note he sent to ABC News while on the run after the shooting.

When you compare his words with his deeds, there is a sense that Flanagan saw himself as a righteous crusader fighting racism and defending black lives, and that’s not as unusual as it sounds in modern-day America.

Flanagan checked off all the boxes of victimization. Either he received poor treatment from others because of his race, or he was derided because he was a gay man — or if not those traits, then something else.

And what’s almost as sad as the senseless deaths of two young, vibrant people are the thousands of like-minded Americans who point to racial discrimination as the source of all evil, the decision-making factor in a citizen’s success or failure in this country, even in instances when it’s not.

There are very real victims of racial intolerance in this country, and you can can count Parker and Ward among them, but not Flanagan.

He was a practitioner and promoter of racial division and animosity, a victim in search of a cause he tried to spin into a story that, in his mind alone, made him the injured party — and the good guy.

Chip Johnson is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. His column runs on Tuesday and Friday. E-mail: chjohnson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @chjohnson